Arthur turned his gaze toward Vanessa.
Vanessa stood near the entrance, her stunning maroon dress now looking like a absurd costume. She backed up until her heels hit the glass wall, her eyes wide with terror as she realized the monumental scale of the catastrophe she had engineered.
Chapter 6: The Fall of Sterling
"You listened to her?" Arthur Sterling whispered, his voice trembling with a mixture of rage and profound disappointment. "You leveraged forty percent of our corporate credit to buy a shell company based on the legal advice of a mid-level PR director?!"
"She had the proxy signatures, Dad!" Julian cried, his voice breaking.
"The proxies were voided at midnight, Mr. Sterling," James said quietly from the head of the table. "Your son signed an unconditional personal guarantee on the bank loan used to purchase Aegis. Because the quantum patents have reverted to my private holding firm, Aegisโs market valuation just dropped from fifty million dollars... to zero."
The room went dead quiet.
The only sound was the faint hum of the air conditioning and the distant murmur of traffic eighty stories below.